Shoppers are suckers for stats?even when they’re meaningless

Researchers find that attaching numbers—even ones they made up—to a product's …

From gigahertz to bogomips, dot pitch to DPI, it's hard to exist in the electronics age without getting bombarded by figures that are supposed to help you understand what, precisely, you're getting for your money. But really, how many of us understand the implications of a few extra megahertz in the memory interface on a graphics card? A study released by the Journal of Consumer Research suggests it doesn't really matter: everyone just wants bigger numbers. As the researchers found, it doesn't even matter if those numbers don't line up with personal experience, or even if they're completely made up.

The research was focused on the gap between how we perceive an item based on experience, and how we view the item based on what we know about it. For example, we can have experience using a digital camera, and think it takes great pictures; in marketing jargon, this is termed a "hedonic preference," which the authors parenthetically defined as "liking." (Why they just didn't use liking...). At the same time, we're typically aware of specifications, such as megapixels.

Both of these should contribute to purchase decisions, and the authors set up a series of tests using students at a major Chinese university. The tests were designed to determine the relative weight of liking versus specs, based on the hypothesis that consumers will base their decisions on specifications when buying something.

The first test involved megapixels. The authors took a single image, and used Photoshop to create a sharper version, and one with more vivid colors; they told the students that the two versions came from different cameras. When told nothing about the cameras, about 25 percent of the students chose the one that had made the sharper image. But providing a specification reversed that. When told that the other model captured more pixels using a figure based on the diagonal of the sensor, more than half now picked it. When it comes to specs, bigger is better, too, even if the underlying property is the same. Given the value in terms of the total number of pixels captured, the preference for the supposedly high-resolution camera shot up to 75 percent.

One could assume a reasonable percentage of the population has some grip on megapixels, so the authors looked into how well the preference for numbers correlated with an underlying reality. The authors made up a scale that was supposed to represent the aromatic properties of sesame oil, and told the students that nothing could be inferred from the relative values in this scale (i.e., a 2:1 ratio of values doesn't mean that one is twice as aromatic). When simply told that one oil was "more concentrated," which it was, and given a chance to smell them, about three-quarters preferred the concentrated one. But, when given fake aroma values that indicated a large difference between the two, that number jumped to over 90 percent.

Buyers were even subject to influence by numbers they themselves provided. Students were given two towels, and asked to make a choice between a softer version, and one that was a more appealing color. Just over half the students opted for softer. A second set of students was told to represent the relative softness of the towels as circles. Half that group was told to consider the area in the circle when making a choice, and that caused 83 percent of them to opt for the softer one. Asked to consider the diameter, where the relative numerical differences are smaller, and the preference for the softer towel dropped back to the levels in the control experiment.

The authors did a couple more tests, using things like cell phone screens and potato chips, but the results were consistent: students liked to have numbers, and the bigger the number, the more they favored an item. Although this was the most thorough examination of the phenomenon, it wasn't the first; the authors describe an earlier study as follows:

Participants were given a choice between a short proofreading task that would award 60 points and a longer proofreading task that would award 100 points and were told that 60 points would entitle them to a serving of vanilla ice cream and 100 points would entitle them to an equally large serving of pistachio ice cream. Most participants opted for the longer task. But when asked later which ?avor they would enjoy more, most favored the vanilla ice cream.

The paper wraps up with advice for both marketers and consumers. For marketers, the message was simple: if your product doesn't already have some numeric measure associated with it, try to find one and popularize it. For consumers, the authors suggest that the only real solution is to try to put numbers out of their heads, and get hands-on time with the product before making a choice.